


Evidence Against

by sunflowerseedsandscience



Series: Early On [1]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s01e01 Pilot, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2016-09-11
Packaged: 2018-08-14 12:11:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8013250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunflowerseedsandscience/pseuds/sunflowerseedsandscience
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The biggest clue, Scully thinks, as she lights one of the thick pillar candles on the dresser and begins to prepare for a bath, lies in her reaction to Ethan's proposal.  When he'd dropped to his knee, her initial reaction had not been one of joy, or even a thought that she might be ready for this one day, maybe soon, even if she wasn't quite there yet.</p><p>No, her mental reaction had been a complete and unequivocal <em>Oh, shit.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Evidence Against

Scully hangs up the phone and leans back against the headboard, sighing in exasperation. She glances over at her laptop, knowing she should return to her field notes, that she needs to focus, that she should have known better, shouldn't have even made the damn phone call in the first place, but it's no good. She's riled up now, upset, and the last thing she wants to do is to return to her confused and disjointed musings on this equally confusing and disjointed case. But all she can think about is his face, his disappointed, miserable face, and it's not doing anything for her mood or her concentration.

"I'm sorry, okay?" she'd said to him, right before leaving for the airport. "I didn't plan for this at all. I didn't even know I was going to _have_ this assignment until yesterday afternoon." He had been sitting rigidly in her bed, his back against the headboard, arms tightly crossed.

"You don't _look_ sorry," he'd said, lower lip jutting out in the mother of all pouts. Nobody could manage a preschooler-level pout quite like Ethan. "You said yourself you never wanted to go with me in the first place. This is just a convenient excuse."

"This is _work_ , Ethan," she'd said, exasperated. "I don't have a choice, not if I don't want to be labelled as an unreliable rookie who's not willing to put in the hours." She'd been packing her toiletries, her clothing having been folded into her carry-on the night before, at around the same time this fight had begun. "And I never made it a secret that I didn't want to go to your family reunion. I'm not really in the mood to spend a full weekend warding off nosy grandmothers who want to know when we'll stop 'living in sin' and get married."

"I gave you the option to stop those questions, if you'll recall," Ethan had said.

"And _I_ said I wasn't ready for that yet, Ethan," Scully had countered. "Three times, as a matter of fact."

"Just how long do you need to be ready, Dana?" he'd asked. "A year isn't enough time? Really?" She had elected not to answer, had instead zipped up her case, kissed his cheek quickly, and had left to meet the cab idling in front of her building.

Now, she sits alone in her motel room, not missing him in the slightest. She's glad, in truth, to be on the opposite side of the country from him, particularly after this most recent shouting match on the phone. She didn't believe, not for a second, Ethan's assertion that his mother had taken her absence at the reunion as an insult. Helen Minette has never been her biggest fan, and the feeling is mutual. Part of the reason Scully is glad not to be with Ethan in Maine right now- part of the reason she dreads any function involving his family- is Ethan's consistent failure to defend her against his mother's incessant sniping, her thinly-veiled waspish insults that Ethan always fails to recognize as such, always excuses as "just my mom being old-fashioned."

 _Chalk that up in the "evidence against" column, Dana_ , Scully thinks to herself, staring unseeingly at her laptop screen. She knows, in her heart, that it's long past time to weigh the pros and cons and figure it out: has her relationship with Ethan passed its expiration date? Why hasn't a year been enough time to know how she feels? She knows she needs to sit down, weigh out the evidence for staying with Ethan and the evidence against, and figure out what to do....

...but not tonight. Tonight, she needs to work. Mulder is right in the next room, unless he's gone out for another run like last night, and there's little to no chance he hasn't heard every word (on her end) of her conversation with Ethan. The last thing Scully wants is to meet up with Mulder in the morning, bags under her eyes from lack of sleep, having gotten absolutely nothing done because she'd spent the entire night pining away for her boyfriend back home, like a teenager who's not yet learned to put her personal issues on the back burner and focus on the work in front of her. 

She's not yet questioned why it's so important to prove herself to Mulder, why it means so much to her to win his trust when she's only known him a couple of days. She had meant it when she'd told him that she only wants to solve this case, that she's here to find the truth, the same as him, and for some reason, she wants very much for him to believe her. She doesn't know why she's been selected for this assignment, or how long it will last, but if there had been any chance she might throw in the towel early and request a reassignment, it was substantially lessened by Mulder's assertion that she's been sent to spy on him, and entirely obliterated the moment he insinuated that, if he were to share his honest hypothesis, she'd run off and "put it down in your little report," presumably in an attempt to discredit him.

He has thrown down a challenge.

_Make me trust you. Prove to me that I can._

When someone challenges Dana Scully to do something, no matter how impossible, she doesn't know how to do anything else but meet that challenge. She never has. It is in her nature to fight tooth and nail to do the exact things those around her believe she's incapable of. It's what saw her through medical school and the Academy, and it's what she's counting on to see her through this assignment, as well. It's who she is.

Does Mulder sense this about her? He's a profiler. Sensing these things about other people is what he does.

Is that why he's challenging her?

Either way, tonight is not the time to think about that, not about any of it. It's not time to worry about Mulder's motivations, and _definitely_ not time to think about Ethan, to make her painstaking list of reasons to stay, reasons to go. Scully pulls her laptop back towards herself and begins to type, picking up where she had left off when she'd made the unwise decision to pick up the phone and call Ethan.

"Agent Mulder's insistence of time loss due to unknown forces cannot be validated or substantiated by this witness."

That's about as far as she gets, however, before a massive thunderclap sounds outside, and the room is suddenly plunged into darkness, her laptop included.

Okay, so maybe she _will_ be thinking about that list tonight.

Scully shoves the now-useless laptop aside, cursing herself for not leaving it plugged in to charge while she'd been out, and flops back on her bed, staring at the ceiling as lightning flashes erratically across it. _All right,_ she thinks to herself. _Evidence for._

There's Ethan's fun-loving personality, of course, the way he can so easily draw her outside of herself, help her not to take everything quite so seriously. He's always been good for her that way. He's got a stable career, excellent prospects, a great future ahead of him, and he wants her to be a part of it. He understands her being drawn to the FBI, he supported her decision to move from being an instructor at the Academy to working in the field, something that, in absence of her family's support on that front, has meant a lot to her. He loves her.

And she loves him, of course.

(Doesn't she?)

And in the "Evidence against" column....

As Scully is finding out now, his support for her working in the field seems to have been more theoretical than anything else. It's possible he's reacting so badly this first time because the trip to Oregon has coincided with his family reunion... but he must understand that this will happen again, right? She's likely to miss other family events, not to mention things like nights out with friends, social functions with his colleagues, and even just dinners between the two of them, should a case come along at the wrong moment. Is he going to react this way every time? His behavior the past few days has not been what she would term "supportive."

Then there's his mother's treatment of her- or, more specifically, Ethan's tolerance of his mother's treatment. Scully doesn't expect him to completely alienate his mother, not over his girlfriend of barely a year, but she _would_ like him to grow a little bit of a spine, just enough to tell his mother that she doesn't have to like Scully, but that insulting her is unacceptable. It's particularly galling when she thinks about how many times she's defended Ethan to her father, who disapproves nearly as much as Ethan's mother does.

And then there's Mulder. Scully includes him, not as a rival for her affections (because he's not- she's known him for less than seventy-two hours, for Christ's sake), but because she suspects that that's how Ethan will come to see him, sooner or later. At the very least, Ethan will see him as usurping too much of her time, and almost definitely too much of her attention. She's not sure she can really and truly give this new assignment her all if she knows that, at the end of every day, she's going to need to spend hours massaging Ethan's bruised ego. Just the thought makes her exhausted.

The biggest clue, Scully thinks, as she lights one of the thick pillar candles on the dresser and begins to prepare for a bath, lies in her reaction to Ethan's proposal. When he'd dropped to his knee, her initial reaction had not been one of joy, or even a thought that she might be ready for this one day, maybe soon, even if she wasn't quite there yet.

No, her mental reaction had been a complete and unequivocal _Oh, shit._

Scully runs the water in the tub, remembering Ethan's disappointment as he'd caught sight of her face. She had been completely unsuccessful in disguising her feelings, and he had spent much of the remainder of that evening sitting on her bed, pouting, much the same way he had the morning she'd left for Oregon.

 _Her_ bed. A year with Ethan, seven months living together, and she still only ever thought of it as _her_ bed, _her_ apartment. Never theirs. And if she's unwilling, after this much time, to cede part ownership of her bed to him, is she ever going to be willing to make a larger commitment? 

The tub is nearly full, and Scully unties her robe, allowing it to drop. As she reaches for the waistband of her underwear, her fingertips brush something on her lower back. Several somethings... that were definitely not there this morning.

She doesn't pause to think. She whips her robe back around herself, belts it, and runs out her motel room door, into the pouring rain.

Ethan Minette is suddenly the very furthest thing from her mind.


End file.
